Volga

Longest river in Europe, entirely within the territory of the Russian Federation. The Volga has a total length 3,685 km/2,290 mi, 3,540 km/2,200 mi of which are navigable. It rises in the Valdai plateau northwest of Moscow, and flows into the Caspian Sea 88 km/55 mi below the city of Astrakhan. The Volga basin drains most of the central and eastern parts of European Russia, its total drainage area being 1,360,000 sq km/525,100 sq mi.

Course From its source, the Volga follows a roughly southeasterly course to Kazan, and then turns south in a wide curve near Kuibyshev before flowing into a broad delta (some 120 km/75 mi wide) on the northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea. For much of its length, the river has a low left bank and high right bank, especially between Nizhniy-Novgorod and Volgograd. It is free from ice for 200 days a year (near Astrakhan 260 days), and, being largely fed by water from melting snow, is prone to high and protracted spring floods. Its chief tributaries are the Kama on the left and the Oka on the right, each of which is longer than the Rhine. The Volga traverses almost all the landscape zones of the Russian plain, from forest to semi-desert (below Volgograd). In its basin lie two of the country's main industrial areas, the Moscow area between the Volga and the Oka, and the Urals in the basin of the Kama. There are large deposits of oil, natural gas, oil shale, salt, and peat along its course.

Transportation The Volga and its tributaries carry two-thirds of all the goods and over half of all the passengers transported on internal waterways in the Russian Federation. The main goods transported are timber, oil, building materials, grain, and salt. The chief ports on the river are Tver, Yaroslavl, Nizhniy Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Volgograd, Saratov, and Astrakhan. These industrial cities are situated where the river is crossed by railways. Artificial waterways connect the Volga with the Baltic and White Seas (see Volga–Baltic Waterway), the Don (see Volga–Don Canal), and Moscow (see Moscow Canal).

Environmental issues The Kuybyshev, Volgograd, Saratov, and other large hydroelectric stations on the Volga make it one of the main sources of the country's power supply, while the stations' high dams have transformed the river into a series of artificial reservoirs (see Rybinsk). This extensive programme of dam construction and pollution by industrial effluents have had a high cost on the ecosystem of the Volga. Its fish stocks have been especially severely depleted. Also, increased evaporation from the large water surfaces of the reservoirs has helped diminish the supply of water to the Caspian; to offset this, a proportion of the waters of the Vychegda and Pechora rivers in northeast European Russia is diverted into the Volga basin.

History In the Middle Ages, the Volga formed a part of the major trade route from Northern Europe to Central Asia pioneered by the Vikings (Varangians). On its banks rose the medieval states of the Volga Bulgarians (c.454–1236) and the Khazars (c.630), and the khanates established by the Golden Horde (1251–1552).